“even the biographical individual is a social category. It can only be defined in a living context together with others; it is this context that shapes its social character and only in this context does an individual life acquire meaning within given social conditions.”

Agamben

Agamben’s rhetoric and prose suits the grandiosity of metal and hip-hop, but with a dose of self negation. He should release an album as homo sacer. He could brag that he is biopower, the anthropological machine– making gaps between the animal and the human. He could also talk about how he can be killed and not sacrificed. Phrases such as the state of exception, the orginary ban, and his endless use of biblical imagery would also make great songs. He could also rewrite Angel of Death via the witness in Remnants: “auschwitz the meaning of biopower/the way that were all gonna dieeeeeee”

A bit of current events commentary over at Notes for the Coming Community in which Agamben charts the anti-democratic turn of anti-terrorist laws in reaction to an absurd and heinous police raid.

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) ways social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom “it is not possible to attribute a criminal act.” Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague, which allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist “intentions” or “inclinations,” acts that up to now were never considered as means to terroristic ends.